> The Soviet education system was pretty good, by WW2 it had turned a territory with <28% literacy (for Women it was ~13%) into an empire with >75% literacy. N

> The Soviet education system was pretty good, by WW2 it had turned a territory with <28% literacy (for Women it was ~13%) into an empire with >75% literacy. Note that it was fairly easy to improve literacy by a lot, because the starting point was so low, after the reactionary and eventually dysfunctional rule in Russia proper. But of course the progress during Soviet rule was still quite remarkable. But already before that, Finland, where I live - what was a Grand Duchy under the tsar, a part of the empire but not part of Russia - had literacy rate 98 % in 1880. The duchy was self-governing within the empire, the central government just taking care of foreign and military policy. The tool to reach this was religious/church control of sexual lives: here you couldn't get a marriage permission unless you'd acquired enough literacy to read religious texts.